Things are better today. You can relax.  I feel much better and everything seemed to work well today. I may not be learning any lessons but I’m happy. 

Yesterday’s walk had one, big, steep climb and a longer steep descent but the rest of the trail, at least until the albergue, was fairly easy to manage. Today’s walk had shorter climbs and descents but there were a lot of them. We ended up with a total ascent for the day of 1,110m, mor than twice what yesterday’s hike had. As we are not in shape yet, it was a tough day but we held up. I was trying to average a 4km/hr pace and we were only 20 minutes slower than that target for the day.  The last three kilometers were really a slog though and my body was saying “too much”!  That may have been because kms 16 and 17 were both at a pace of 12min/km.  We were moving fast then, trying to stay in front of a large group of 40 or 50 pilgrims. 

Once again, there were a lot of people on the trail today so we got a lot of exchanges of “buen Camino” and many short chats with people.  We didn’t see Seamus and Michael, the Irish guys we had dinner last night with but we did see the four Canadians who we had breakfast with today. They were in such deep conversations with each other though that they didn’t even recognize us.

We passed two couples that seemed to be having a lot of trouble on the trail.  The first one was a young Korean couple and the girl seemed to be regretting letting her husband organize the honeymoon. She must have had her heart set on Hong Kong’s Disneyland but he was more adventurous. They were heading up the first big hill and the boy was practically pushing the girl up the hill. I used one of the five phrases that I know in Korean and they both beamed for different reasons. He was semi-impressed that a Westerner could almost pronounce a Korean greeting. She was ecstatic that she could stop walking for a minute and giggle at my attempts (and reasoning) trying to say “thank you”, “goodbye”, where is the toilet” and “no, I don’t want any”.  

The other couple appeared to be an elderly Portuguese husband and wife. He appeared to be a Camino veteran. She was obviously a Camino virgin. She would walk 10 steps then stop, cross her arms and turn her back to her husband. He would walk back and coax, cajole, beg, plead for her to start walking again. She did… ten more steps and everything was repeated again.  He was not looking happy. 

We arrived in Estella 20 minutes before we had access to our room so we had a hamburger and salad lunch. I mistakenly ordered a beer which disappeared faster than a political dissent in Russia, North Korea or America. 

After settling into our room and doing the normal chores, we checked Google maps to see if there was a laundromat nearby. There was!  And only 300m away. Fantastic!  That saved me from handwashing just the basic clothing and letting it drip dry over our bed all night. When we walked there with our bag of laundry, we had a big surprise.  It was one of those disappointments again since it appeared to be the only laundromat in town.  I could see when we got close that the small room only had one washer and one dryer. That was odd but they looked empty so 5hat was good, right?  Another odd sighting was that the little room also had a strangely thin shower inside and the shower was visible through the large glass windows. Huh? When I saw the washer though, it all made sense. There was a sign above it that said in Spanish that it was only for use for pet’s towels and pets clothing. That was a dog cleaning station in the other part of the room.  We started back to the hotel to do the handwashing but then I decided to double check. Sure enough, there was a large human laundromat waiting for customers just on the other side of the pet version. Shew!

Finally, we had a lovely pilgrim meal tonight with German Susi who we rescued as she was about to walk into a Pizza Hut. Karl from somewhere joined us for dessert as he already met everyone.  We met him yesterday when we stopped for a sandwich just short of Puente la Reina.  Susi knew him from Roncesvalles when she dragged him to evening mass. It happens like this on the Camino all the time. 

Peace y’all and good night George, Leo and Stella.